Last week the Castle Theater had a foreclosure auction. The bank which held the loan purchased the theater for roughly $250,000 with the intent to sell it. The Theater is easily worth double or triple that amount. There was some talk of converting the upper floors into condos but no mention of that had been made in quite a while.

The Castle Theatre is still open as a live music venue. There is an official web site, and the house has at least one event per week booked through January, with other events scheduled into March.

The February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an article about the opening of the Castle Theatre, which can be read in this Google Books scan. The theater was built by C. U. Williams, a Bloomington businessman who, along with being involved in various other enterprises, was a well-known publisher of picture postcards.

The Castle Theatre was part of the headquarters building of C. U. Williams & Son, and was originally operated under lease by William R. Lyon (or Lyons) and Delmar Schnepp. In 1923 the Castle was taken over by Clarence Irvin, who had been operating other theaters in Bloomington for more than a decade.

Many sources on the Internet claim that the Castle was originally a Balaban & Katz house, but it appears that B&K only became involved in the operation later. I’ve found references to the Castle being a B&K house by 1927. It was still being operated by B&K in 1949 according to this list on the Balaban & Katz Foundation’s web site.

This house was not the first Bloomington theater to have the name Castle. An earlier house of that name was under construction in 1904, when it was a subject of a petition from its owner that was read at the November 4 meeting of the Bloomington City Council. Mr. J. G. Gillingham was petitioning the Council to consider lowering the license fee for his theater, which he said would present vaudeville at low prices. Bloomington’s license fee for “Opera Houses” was $200 a year.

The petition notes that the Castle Theatre would be located in a remodeled building at the corner of Washington and East Streets, though it doesn’t specify which corner. The Majestic Theatre would open at the southwest corner of that intersection in 1910, and the Castle was still in operation at that time, so it was one of the other corners. I’ve been unable to discover whether or not it continued operating under a different name after this Castle Theatre opened in 1916.

Wow, I remember the renovation of this theater occurring and that it only had just reopened, back in my brief Illinois State University days in the mid-2000s! Also recall reading about the church that had started to use the Castle, after I sadly(due to grades) was forced to drop out of Illinois State. Great to hear it’s being used as a music venue, as of now.